By David K. Shipler
There is nothing sadder than fear.
--Isabel Allende
A new divide is plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist the authoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread your way between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keep your head down to present less of a target?
All those
tactics are being used by a citizenry devoid of the skills needed to keep alive
a dying democracy. By and large, Americans don’t see what’s coming. Only a few
have experienced dictatorships (abroad) and fewer still have lived under
governments with totalitarian aspirations.
In modern America, the native-born have
not been seized in the streets for their political views and imprisoned by
masked agents without recourse. University and school curricula have not been
dictated by Washington. Science, art, and literature have not been censored. Government
officials tasked with impartiality have not been routinely screened for political
loyalty to a lone leader. A central ideology has not been dispensed beyond
government into civil society at large, enforced by existential threats to
private organizations that do not comply.
The country has enjoyed a happy,
complacent spirit of assumptions about the permanence of the constitutional
system. That is now being swept away by the Trump maelstrom, its place taken by
an unfamiliar fear—cleverly implanted by the president and his apparatchiks.
What opposition has developed has
been fragmented and too far from unanimous to rescue a failing democracy that
has already descended into a semi-dictatorship. The United States is now
governed largely by the whims of a single man. His daily impulses disrupt global
markets, end vital research, halt life-giving aid to children, turn workers
jobless, impair education, promote white supremacy, and still dissenting
voices.
He has cowed huge law firms, rich
corporations, major foundations, news organizations, and prominent
universities—some of each—by imposing financial fear in various forms. A few imagine
that they can buy the favor of the bully. They must have lived a charmed life
of never having encountered a bully, a mafia boss, a dictator.
The charmed life of the United States has ended.
